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It was so hot in Hotel New Valoran that the city’s finest sinners were all sweating out their money through their diamonds and pearls, the night Luxanna Crownguard met the Devil’s red eyes over the barrel of her gun.
The space soared around her from the moment she strutted in on Jarvan’s arm; a palace all built in gold geometry under the swollen bellies of velvet curtains, so much gold you could almost count the coins that’d gone into every inch of the place. The crowd, packed into fine-cut suits and glittering gowns, festooned the foyer, dripped lazily off the railing of the grand stairwells, chattered on the landings, or clustered in the ballrooms already half-cut before the main event. They fit like someone had painted them onto the walls of the hotel, because of course they did; they were built out of the same money it was.
The next ten city blocks all sold off at auction wouldn’t make up the money in this room, but it wouldn’t have earned a glint of a thought from a girl with the breeding of Luxanna Crownguard, if it weren’t for the novelty of knowing there wasn’t a penny of it in this town that wasn’t bent like a paper clip.
Lux came in like someone had opened blinds to the sun, armed to her perfect teeth with her perfect lips and the famous smile they made together. Her armor was all the clothes she wasn’t wearing and the gold and diamonds and strings of pearls she was. Her war cry was the faint ringing chimes of her shoes on the marble floor and the gleam of the geometric sunbeam patterns in her tiny dress, the angles and curves of the body it made love to with every step, and the swish of the snow-white Ionian foxtail shawl slung carelessly over her bare shoulders. Her shields were the elbow-length black gloves, the back of her palm’s last line of defense from the lips of half a hundred men between the front doors and the stairwell up to the ballroom, the jazz ensemble, the dance floor, and, blessedly, the bar.
“Darling, won’t you join me in the VIP after we’ve made our introductions?” she hummed in Jarvan’s ear.
Prince Jarvan IV’s spotless gold and black suit sheathed him like he’d been forged in it, his freshly shaven face still shadowed along his rugged jaw and his long black hair and smoldering eyes drawing admiration and envy from men and women alike. Together they cut the very image of the freshest young jewels of the Old World rubbing shoulders with bankers, entrepreneurs and movie stars on the cutting edge of the New.
But, just like the beauty on his arm, he’d been raised in marble halls far, far from the grease and smoke of New Valoran City. This whole soiree was in their honor, but there was a razor behind every whisky smile; they were the night’s fatted calves, and both knew it.
They’d finally freed themselves from the hand-shakers and hand-kissers and made their luminary way into the ballroom, and they’d only have to snap their fingers for trays of drinks, canapes - or anything else they wanted, legal or otherwise – to manifest.
Jarvan lowered a cigar someone had put in his mouth and blew out smoke into an already hazy atmosphere, “Now now, angel of my eyes,” she could hear the cough he was fighting back, “We talked about tonight, didn’t we? No vanishing from the stage before the final act.”
Lux’s jaw twitched, but she gave him – and everyone else in proximity – her most heart-melting pout and the biggest, bluest eyes between here and Silvermere City; “But I do so feel like sitting down, after that long long walk up all those stairs in these heels, and shouldn’t a prince hold court?”
“You’re talking like one of the crowd, dear,” Jarvan chided, “Don’t forget; three months more and you’ll be the future Queen of Demacia.”
“Well, when in New Val, isn’t that what they say?” Lux rolled her eyes and swung her head with a hint of drama and the flick of her short golden bob and the tall white feather in her tiara, “Fine. If you won’t let me sit down, I’ve half a mind to dance. Would it hurt to live a little before we’re consigned to the royal life for the rest of ours?”
“In a place like this?” he muttered, the masquerade slipping for just a moment, “We’re here for the rock, Lux, and on the first ship home tomorrow.”
“All the more reason,” Lux gave him a look that was harder than the diamond.
A frown that might have even been genuine touched Jarvan’s lips for a moment, but it was far too late, for the crowds parted like sparrows before a swooping gull.
“Ah, there’s our fairytale royals,” boomed a warm, charming voice, “Just in time!”
Jayce Talis was the Man of the Hour, every hour, of every day and every week and every year, and the best and worst thing to be said of him was that he knew it. He crossed the hotel floor as if he owned it – he did – and was pushing a drink into Jarvan’s hand and snapping his fingers for one to manifest for Lux, in defiance of all royal protocol, before either could say a word elsewise.
“No glum faces on our lovebirds,” Jayce grinned ear to ear, and pointed behind them, “Smile for the papers!”
Smoke puffed and Lux blinked as a camera went off in their face before she could finish positioning her arm around Jarvan’s waist, and then he was shaking hands again, hands with Jayce, hands with more tycoons and politicians, whilst Lux hung off his broad frame like her anchor and her head still spun dizzily with light, light, light…
“Jarvan, darling,” Lux hung on his arm, when the spots had faded from her eyes, “Won’t you bring Jayce with us to the VIP room? There are so many people here I can scarce hear my little brain think.”
“Won’t be long now before the main event,” Jarvan said, “Just relax, have a drink, enjoy the music, and soon this whole place will be celebrating the formal announcement of our engagement…”
“And the opening of that vault,” said Jayce, “Your royal sweetheart will be putting the Dawnheart Diamond around your neck before you know it.”
“Historic moment, after all, first time in a century it’s seen the light,” Jarvan said, as if they didn’t know all of that, as if it weren’t the whole reason they were in New Valoran City at this swanky party at Jayce’s gaudy hotel in the first place, “The Demacian crown thanks the Ecliptic Vaults for so discreetly keeping it secure all these years.”
The irony of keeping the Lightshield family’s rarest possession in a vault under the metropolis known all over the world as ‘Crime City’ wasn’t lost on Lux, but with wars always on her homeland’s doorstep, it wasn’t the wildest step the old blood families had taken to guard their own.
“Oh, our pleasure,” said Jayce, “Consider it destiny! A piece of Demacian history, kept by the most advanced vault in the world, being brought out into the light just to grace the throat of her-” here he gave that charmer’s wink at Lux, “-other most radiant jewel.”
“Wonderful,” she kept her smile as dazzling as his words, “Can’t wait.”
“If you don’t mind, actually, Lux,” Jayce leaned over and lay a hand on her arm, “I’ll be stealing your fiancé a moment for the craps table and some business talk.”
“Well, I suppose I could keep my own company, since someone made me leave poor Galio with the doorman…" Lux half-lidded her eyes and flashed her fiancé a pouting glare.
“You could always join us,” Jarvan cleared his throat, “I fear I’ll lose half the Demacian treasury if I play against this old shark without your keen eye, Luxanna…” he smiled as an aside to Jayce, “She’s practically my good luck charm, didn’t you know? Not just a pretty face, she’s the smartest girl in Demacia.”
“That so, old boy?” said Jayce, turning a shrewd eye on Lux, “Wonder if you could show our Academy kids a thing or two about old-fashioned brains, Lady Crownguard. I swear to Janna, they’re sending me gray before my time, I’ll wind up looking like old Heimerdinger before I’m forty.”
As he said so, he ran his fingers through his slick black hair, and the silver at his temples that Lux knew by reputation sent women to their knees in more ways than one.
“Oh, women love a silver fox, Jayce, didn’t you know?” Lux gave him, “I’m sure it’ll do no harm to your famous bachelorhood. Speaking of-”
Two gorgeous women had manifested from the crowd behind him, an ebony-and-ivory duo of bright gold on flawless black skin and blue on pale. Both absolutely dripped with finery, and with a certain restrained touch of class that told Lux, immediately, that they weren’t crass new money like most of the girls here.
The woman in gold, though, wore hers with more confidence; she radiated an aura of one truly in her element as she gave Lux a warm smile and took Jayce’s arm.
“An honor, Your Highness, Lady Crownguard,” she said, in a voice as honey-gilt as her attire, “Mel Medarda. I’ll be attending the aforementioned business talk.”
“Lady Medarda, apart from being the other most beautiful woman in Valoran City, sits the City Council and is the heir of Medarda Trade Corp,” Jayce said, by way of introduction, his arm slipping around her perfect waist, “And ah, let me introduce my dear friend, best and oldest friend-”
He turned and beamed at the tall, raven-tressed woman who’d come up with her; Lux thought, at a glance, both that she recognized her from somewhere, and that, while she had an aristocratic cast to her cheekbones and wore her beautiful blue gown well, she looked a little awkward; a little too leanly muscular and stiff-backed for the setting.
Lux recognized one of her own; a hunting-hound, not a lapdog, but just as purebred.
“Hello, Lux,” the woman said, with a twitch of a nervous smile, “It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?”
“Caitlyn!” Lux gasped, flinging herself from Jarvan’s arm to hang on that of the other girl, “Why, look at you, ten feet tall? Why, how many years has it been?”
Caitlyn’s smile grew more genuine; “At least eight, I should think, you’ve surely grown quite…” she flushed, fumbling for words, “…luminous yourself!”
“You could steal books from the very top shelf for me,” Lux gave her most mischievous grin, “If we resume our activities from when we were young imps together.”
“Oh, she won’t be stealing anything these days,” Jayce added with a laugh, “Quite the opposite! She’s the reason your Dawnheart Diamond is safe tonight. Isn’t that right, Commissioner Kiramman?”
Caitlyn cleared her throat, and suddenly the clash of her posture and her attire made sense.
“Police Commissioner?” Lux gawped without shame, “Well, lock me up and throw away the key…”
“Hoping that shan’t be necessary, dear Lux,” said Caitlyn with a somewhat bashful smile, “But may I offer, with all sincerity, that you have my very best security on detail for this event. That you’d choose our city to host this happy occasion for your engagement means the world to us…”
“Of course, Cait-”
“Yes, yes,” said Jayce, rapping his fingers impatiently on his champagne glass before tossing it back with all the crude languor of a man who had enough money and fame to care not one whit about formality beyond its glitziest trappings, “Business, and the tables, wait for none of us, I’m afraid. Joining us, ladies?”
“I’ve never been a gambling woman-” Caitlyn began, and Lux gave a wan smile and waved them off as the musicians changed their tune to lively swing.
“I think I just found my dancing legs. Go on ahead, I’ll make Cait keep me company.”
“Cait, you’ll keep her out of trouble, won’t you?” Jayce reinforced her, “You two seem thick as thieves.”
“Without the stealing part, of course,” Lux gave Caitlyn a wink.
“O-of course,” said Caitlyn, visibly relieved.
“Don’t let anyone steal Lux before I can give her the Dawnheart Diamond,” Jarvan said with a chuckle and a shake of his head, already moving away with Jayce and Mel.
“Don’t bankrupt the kingdom,” said Lux, with a cheerful wave, one gloved hand already slipped around Caitlyn’s arm, and tugging her away from their company.
Into the midst of the dancers she plunged, a few surprised glances cast her way as she took the floor with Caitlyn – who was so awkwardly trying to insist on conversation that Lux wound up treading on her toes once or twice, like some corn-shredder at a college rub.
Two, three drinks later, the tall girl finally loosened up, giggling under her breath as Lux tore up the floor with her to the jump and bounce of the big swing band at the far end of the ballroom, heedless of Caitlyn’s rapidly pinkening cheeks. Nerves and awareness of all the eyes on them made the police girl a clumsy dancer, if one of admirable fitness and stamina.
But Lux didn’t care one whit; Caitlyn was friendly, guileless company on a night when she couldn’t shake the feeling that every winning smile was made of knives she couldn’t quite see.
Or maybe she just needed more gin.
Lux closed her eyes and fell into the music, wishing she wasn’t counting every beat until Jarvan would hang that gorgeous diamond around her neck and they could finally…
It wasn’t to last.
Just after the sweat and heat of the fourth or fifth song came the grunt and huff of someone pushing through the crowd to her left; a big hulk of a man in an ill-fitting suit leaned over, muttered, “Chief…” and then whispered in Caitlyn’s ear.
Her companion’s giddy smile faded, and her eyes went flinty. Lux heard her hiss something incredibly unladylike under her breath, and then she was shaking her head.
“Lux, I’m sorry, I’ve got to-”
“Police business, I understand.”
An apologetic glance was swiftly swallowed in that flinty look; she only heard snatches of “What in hell’s going on–” and “Markoli’s downtown-” and “-the rats think they’re doing?!” before the crowd swallowed them.
Lux was still sweating from the dance and the proximity of so many moving bodies, but the crowded ballroom suddenly felt cold anyway. Not for the first time, she felt the itchy crawl of resentment that Jarvan had insisted on leaving all eight feet of polished metal and immaculate white suit that was Galio, her trusted bodyguard, to perch awkwardly at the front door instead of looming at her side where he belonged.
Her darting eyes searched for discrepancies – she couldn’t quite place the feeling –
Was it the brawny-looking man with the tweed cap pulled down over his eyes smoking by the archway to the bathrooms? Plenty of men here were wearing hats inside, but he had a kind of working-class slouch that seemed incongruous with the slick room…or was it the hasty way one of the bellboys was hustling along in the background?
Lux wasn’t alone long enough to collate her thoughts. She was just craning her neck for a path through the crowd when someone passed her, not a drink, a cigarette, or a canape, but the stem of a red, red rose.
Lux blinked at the gift, then looked up.
“A radiant beauty like you dancing alone, M’lady?” said a young man’s voice, “I couldn’t let a tragedy like that stand.”
His spotless white suit with the big pink rose at the lapel wrapped a blue-eyed boy barely her own age, with a pretty face and a cocky little smile most of the women here and half of the men would be quite happy to see between their legs by the end of the night.
“Sorry, do I know you?” was the first thing to slip from Lux’s mouth.
“Oh, probably not. My reputation usually does the talking for me, but you don’t look the type to have your ear to the door,” he said smoothly, “Ezreal Lymere, at your service, m’lady.”
And his became the hundred and first pair of lips to plant on the back of her hand.
“I’m assuming you know who I am,” she said, only faintly amused at the distraction from her unsettled feeling.
“Lady Luxanna Crownguard of House Crownguard of Demacia,” he admitted with an arch of his brow and a lopsided smirk, “Or…may I call you Lux?”
“Slow down there, fella,” she narrowed her eyes, “That one’s for my friends.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” he said, “I’m more than equal to it, trust me.”
Despite herself, she had to laugh at his audacity, “You know this is my engagement party, don’t you? To the Crown Prince of Demacia…?”
Ezreal shrugged.
“I don’t see any princes about,” he said, peering theatrically like a sailor scanning the horizon, “Do you?”
Lux stared at him.
“You know who I do see, though?” he fell into a smooth dance opposite her, keeping in time with the music, “A girl in need of a dance partner.”
There was just enough self-aware goofiness in his movements to charm her; or keep her attention, at least, for the moment.
“You truly do think you’re the cats’ meow, don’t you-” Lux shook her head, “Well, Mister, show me – how’s it said here? A gay old time? – and I’ll do you a favor of my own…”
She fell into his rhythm, twisting and shimmying to the playful beat.
“Oh?” he teased, excitement flashing in his eyes, leaning in with the gyrations of the dance, “And what might that be?”
“Convincing my husband to be not to have you beheaded.”
Ezreal’s eyebrows raised.
“I’ll consider it a worthwhile risk.”
“Do you regularly put your life on the line to dance with a girl you don’t know?”
He was at least a little funny and kept her mind firmly away from the crawling sensation that everything wasn’t quite right and the itchy little urge to flee the crowded ballroom, Jarvan be damned.
“I’m all about risk and reward,” he said, “In my business.”
“And what business is that?”
Ezreal chuckled.
“Antiquities.”
The wink he followed that up with suggested it wasn’t necessarily legal antiquities.
Lux tried to conceal the twitch of interest from flaring up in her eyes; history, particularly ancient history, being very much of appeal to her, and greedily devoured from many a book huddled in her room. No, it wouldn’t do at all to show him that, better to let him think she was some languid, airheaded doll with no interest beyond a pretty face and a few fancy moves.
“I suppose there’s some risk of being crushed by dusty record boxes,” she conceded.
Ezreal flashed a little hurt, but his blue eyes twinkled.
“Call on me sometime, and I’ll show you. You might be surprised.”
There it was; bottomless enthusiasm for his ‘profession’ that he was barely reining in, just to make an impression.
“Maybe,” Lux smirked, “I’m more the risk-averse type?”
“Says the girl who came all the way from Demacia just to put the world’s rarest diamond on her neck in the middle of Crime City.”
Her eyes met his, blue to blue, and she read him like one of her books, right down to the core.
The ringing of a champagne glass into a microphone signaled the return of Jayce – and with him, Jarvan – and the commencement of the unlocking of the Dawnheart Diamond.
Lux’s lips melted into her very sweetest smile.
“Well, well, Mister – ah! What was your name again…?”
“Ezreal.”
Lux slung her arms over his shoulders, let him bask in her fragrance, and leaned in until she could whisper in his ear.
“I think we’re going to be very good friends after all.”
Before he could choke out a reply, she nipped a kiss to his cheek and slid away.
Her heart was pounding, and Jarvan’s eyes crept like ice water down her back, but she only felt a heady, drunken glee as she snaked through the crowd with all the leggy grace of someone eager to be the center of the spotlight for the next few minutes so she could drown the next few hours in the deepest and most private darkness.
But Jayce was waffling, waffling, about the heritage of royalty and the romance of the old families and she needed to compose herself.
She needed air.
Lux fled to the balcony, somewhere she could still hear him and make her way back in time to be the pretty neck the Dawnheart was going to adorn.
Ezreal didn’t join her, to her relief, but she found herself leaning, breathing through the little thrills of panic, next to a skinny girl in a tasseled purple flapper dress, bright orange hair cuddling her heart shaped face beneath a white feather plume headband with a big green jewel on it.
She was swirling what smelled less like whisky and more like something you cleaned a drain with and watching the proceedings through her smokey makeup with a look of utter, murderous boredom.
Until Lux alighted beside her, that is; then the girl’s eyes lit up, red as blood. Lux didn’t pay much attention to her at first, still struggling to control her breathing, until she heard a scratchy giggle from her companion.
“Lookin’ to blouse already, are ya?” the girl’s raspy voice intruded into her thoughts, “Dimbox or cake basket?”
“Excuse me…?” Lux gasped.
“Joint’s crammed to the bow tie with monologists and a Lens Louise or two,” The ginger rolled her blazing eyes, “Don’t blame you for ditching the police dog, Jane.”
Lux stared hard at her, then at the enormous cello case leaning beside her against the railing.
“…a-are you, ah, with the band, miss?”
The girl grinned toothily.
“Nah, doll. I’m the main event.”
She winked.
“or…”
She tipped her head, considering Lux, her shrewd eyes darting around her features in a way that seemed to be piercing right through her.
“…maybe that’s you?”
That set a sudden thrill into Lux’s guts, and the uncomfortable feeling that, despite all her precautions, all her armor, she might be wearing the same face she’d just made Ezreal wear…
Lux blew out a quiet breath, still shaking, and the strange girl grinned and passed her drink to Lux.
Without thinking, she swigged it, grimaced, and resisted the urges both to spit it up and tell the girl it tasted like a crocodile’s stomach acid.
“You’d think,” she said instead, when she could form words, “I’m starting to think I’m just the Showcase of the evening in more ways than I expected.”
“Every cake eater and forty-niner in town stuffed like sausage mince in one big ol’ sweaty room getting ossified from their toes to their hats,” the redhead agreed, “Every one of ‘em sure they’re the butterfly’s boots. And they’re all here for you? Rough ride, chicken.”
Lux’s searching, appraising gaze became a side-eyed glare.
“Call a girl on her foreigner’s ignorance here, but I have no idea of your meaning.”
At that, the ginger threw her head back, gave a raucous, entirely unhinged cackle, and then threw back the swill she was drinking for good measure, in one gulp, as though it was water.
“Ha, yer razzin’ me, doll! You ain’t no dumdora at her first Egg Harbor! Ain’t gonna fool a flap like me, no sirree.”
Lux gave her a shrewd eye, “Oh, I suppose you quite see through my carefully polished masquerade?”
“Yup! Clear as the bottom of a hooch jar,” said the redhead, with a glance flickering down Lux’s gown to her feet, “Well, Ducky! I feel like taking my dogs for a swan. Care to give a knee before you give me the air?”
Lux looked at her proffered hands, sheathed in long mauve gloves – curiously fingerless.
She curled a coy smile at her strange company.
“Say, why not?”
The girl grinned. She swept Lux’s hands up in her own, but instead of kissing them, she winked and pulled Lux with a squeak into a breathless tango, right there on the balcony, humming as she did to a discordant tune quite different from the roaring jazz inside.
Suddenly belly to belly and eye to eye with the stranger, Lux’s breath grew fast. She couldn’t pull away – not from the girl’s wiry, strong little fingers and their unsettlingly iron grip – or she’d risk tripping over her heels. All she could do was go with the dance, each tap and thrust of the girl’s long, skinny legs from her tasseled lavender dress, each breathless twist and turn, until the girl, with a flash of her cheeky white grin, dipped Lux nearly to the floor.
A giggle broke from Lux’s throat; astonishment at the girl’s audacity, disarmament at her demeanor, and a little heady, breathless thrill of fear.
“…who are you?” she whispered.
“Just a girl who thinks she might’ve found the kitten’s ankles, biscuit.”
With a sharp tug, she pulled Lux up against her body again, a perfume of lavender and sweat and – something smoky Lux couldn’t place – drifting in the sudden intimacy of blue eyes and carmine.
“…and with that, I’ve chewed all your charming ears enough,” Jayce’s voice drifted over the crowd, “Seems our Ecliptic representatives are all ready to unveil the other stars of our show…”
“Aw, bank’s closed?” said the ginger, biting her red lip between white, sharp teeth, “Better get back in there and pick up your shiny Handcuff before they send out the fire extinguishers. Get a girl all ready for her Eye Opener, mm?”
“W-what about you?”
She didn’t know why she was even asking. She didn’t even know this girl…
“Oh, askin’ after lil’ old me? I’ll be back to the Whangdoodle in a jiffy,” said the redhead, “Just gotta toodle to the little girl’s room, apply my munitions for the big blow.”
She snapped open a makeup kit with a grin.
Jayce’s voice drifted to Lux’s ears, somehow, through the storm in her head, “Allow me to introduce the happy couple, our Royal guests of honor…”
“Do have a blast, then,” Lux tried not to stutter, I’m a Crownguard, I don’t stutter- “T-thank you for your company.”
She licked her lips.
“I’d better get back in there.”
“Check,” said the girl, “Go on, toots, skedaddle.”
She winked.
“Be seein’ ya.”
Lux stumbled away from her, heart pounding and head whirling with confusion.
The girl, humming to herself, slung her cello case over her bony shoulder like it was empty and strolled away as the crowds swallowed Lux.
She brushed past the big guy with the tweed cap, who studiously didn’t look at her; as Lux stopped to lean on the wall and catch her breath, a trolley of drinks was pushed past her.
It must have been her imagination, but she almost thought she heard something… scratching…inside the walls.
Fancy hotel like this, still having a pest problem? Unheard of, back home, but this was Crime City…if it weren’t all a hallucination from that bad bootleg swill.
“…last time I lap a strange girl’s hooch,” she muttered, wondering what exactly had been in it.
“Entertaining evening, darling?” Jarvan murmured as she took his waiting arm.
“Fabulous,” she replied with a challenging glint in her eyes, soon drowned out in the roar of applause as Jayce announced them.
She almost forgot to put her smile in place as they took the stage amid the glitter and gleam of attention.
A spotlight on the stage fell on an open box on a pillar and there it was; Dawnheart, refracting the falling light in a hundred sparkling hues spilled like a shattered whisky glass on the stage.
A hush fell over the crowd. Even Lux found her breath stuck in her throat like a train that couldn’t quite leave the station. Legends of the diamond’s quality of bleeding the colors of a sunrise into all the light that passed through it despite seeming clear to the naked eye held up, proof positive splashed on all their faces beneath the pale artificial lights of the stage turned warm by all its facets.
The light tinkled and sang to her as solemn bank-men from the Vault lifted the Dawnheart and its silver necklace setting on a little velvet pillow and passed it reverently to Jarvan.
“…Luxanna,” he was saying, halfway in the middle of his speech, but the rest had been blotted out by the noise in her head, “…with this union, may our houses, our fortunes, and our happiness be united, spreading light to the world…”
It was cold, arctic cold on her bare collarbone, like a press of the grim reaper’s lipless kiss, but it glinted bright as the sun with every shift of heaving breath she was trying not to show.
Jarvan looked at her, expectantly, Jayce was beaming in the background.
All she had to do was read her script. All she needed do was say yes.
Everyone was cheering, applauding, the band was playing, the whole world was noise, and the smell of smoke from all the cameras, and Luxanna’s smile fixed to her teeth like she was grinning to beat Death.
All that noise and smoke was precisely why nobody noticed the rats in the walls.
Lux first caught the silhouette of one on the blue velvet stage curtain behind her; the brim of a fedora, a long, twitching snout, moving low and quiet and quick.
Five or six more scurried along the stage rafters and slid down, soundlessly, on ropes behind the people on it.
They announced themselves with a crackle of tommy-gun fire, licking the hotel’s giant ceiling and sparking from the chandelier.
A chorus of screams rose from the crowd. Someone shrieked for ‘security!’ but the two burly men nearest the stage were already on the ground, one face-down in a spreading pool of dark and the other pinned with his shaking hands on the floor, a trenchcoated rat perched on his back with a jagged knife at his throat.
Jayce, Jarvan, and the others on stage backed up, herded by the sleek black barrels clutched in dexterous claws.
“All right sweethearts!” snapped the evident leader, in a thin, reedy scratch of a voice half snorted through his twitching rodent nostrils, “Soiree’s just become a charity show, see? All donations to Boss Twitch’s retirement fund welcome–”
At a jerk of his snout, three more rats darted out of seemingly nowhere, menacing the crowd, grabbing at watches, pearls, rings, snapping their jaws at the affronted, enraged, violated faces of the well-to-do, filling bags with glittering baubles snatched in hooked claws.
The lead rat’s beady eyes glittered.
“And that includes the main event…”
He turned his head to glare at Lux – and the diamond at her throat – just in time for Jarvan to smack him in the face with the microphone stand.
“Lux, run!” he shouted, and then with a grunt his gut caught a gunstock, and he went to one knee under a tide of rats. She didn’t see what happened next; she was bolting backstage, her heels kicked off in her wake, gasping for air.
She ducked behind the velvet curtains, scrambled through the narrow maze of dressing rooms and ran smack into an iron wall shaped like the big guy in the tweed cap.
His huge arms were around her and his hand engulfed her mouth before she could scream.
“Quiet, girlie!” he growled, his face flushed with rage, but she could tell, even in her panic, that his ire wasn’t aimed at her.
That was obvious enough; he was muttering up a storm of oaths under his breath as he dragged her bodily away, toward the backstage entrance.
“The scummy little two-timin’ rats – this wasn’t their job – what in pink hell do they think they’re doing here? Twitch is gonna burn, sending his goons on our score, mark my damn words – when the boss hears about this – gah!”
Lux bit at his sweaty ham-hock of a hand, and the big guy growled and squeezed her, crushingly, until her ribs ached and her eyes went blurry.
“This’ll all go smooth if you don’t struggle,” he growled, as he pulled her out of the maze, “I’m not even here for yo-” He choked off.
There was a knife in the side of his neck, and the bellboy held the handle.
“Shame! I am,” said the bellboy, his nondescript young face made chilling by a nondescript smile.
The big man’s arms slackened and fell away from Lux; he toppled like a thrown potato sack against a support pillar and she fell, gasping, from his arms, eyes wide on his sputtering face and the blood pulsing from his punctured jugular.
“If you’ll accompany me, miss,” said the bellboy, wiping his knife on the dying man’s clothes and creeping toward her with the slow intentionality of a cat with a bird, “It seems there’s been a bit of a cock-up to smooth over. My employer would love to make your acquaintance…”
His eyes flicked to the glint at her throat as she backed away.
Despite the staccato of her heart, an odd sort of calm, an irrational rationality, had fallen over Lux.
“Please,” she raised her hands, “You don’t need to do this. Just take the diamond and let me go.”
“…oh, I’m afraid you’re far too rich a girl,” the bellboy licked his lips, his eyes on the diamond, “In far too dirty a town for that.”
A click, and a gun barrel emerged from the darkness to her left.
“Step back from the dame and the rock, scallywag,” growled the lead rat, sliding from the dark behind her, “Run back to Fortune and tell her whatever play she think she’s makin’ here, it ain’t gonna jive with Boss Twitch, see…”
The rat’s snout shivered as he looked at the dead man in surprise.
“…or Boss Graves. You done screwed the pooch, pal, bumpin’ off his man! Wait, what’s he doin’ here anyway?”
“You tell me!” snarled the bellboy, sweat rolling down from his hat as he backed away, fingers playing around his knife but cautious of the barrel of the gun, “You and your boss are the ones out of line, rodent. Our crew got the call, you’re the ones muscling in…!”
“What?” the rat snorted, cocking his head, glancing at Lux, “Who the hell made the call?”
In the moment of distraction, the bellboy’s eyes flicked to the rat; then a throwing-knife slipped from his sleeve and across the room in a whirl.
The rat squealed and dropped his gun, clutching at his eye; the bellboy dove for the diamond at Lux’s throat with one pawing hand.
The rat’s Tommy gun flashed and boomed blindly in the cold hallway space. Chips of marble jumped from the floor. The bellboy’s grab missed as he rolled for cover behind the hulking corpse of his victim.
Lux ran for the back doors, not looking back.
A strong hand seized hers and pulled her into a side hall. Lux stifled a scream, ready to kick and claw, but the hand gripped hers tight, in small fingers, fingerless purple gloves, a grip so recently familiar.
“Nope!” said the voice of the ginger flapper girl, “Trust me, doll, they’ve got the back door covered. This way!”
Lux looked up into cherry eyes in a cherubic face. The girl tugged her arm, pulled Lux into a small service closet, until Lux was pressed flush to her, chest to chest.
Her fingertip went to Lux’s lips as the scratching scurry of rodent feet scrolled past them, just outside the door.
In the dim light all Lux could hear was her own breath and the redhead’s. She had no words to speak, just the thunder of her heart and the scent of the girl’s smoky perfume and the reflection of the dim light from the Dawnheart diamond in her blazing eyes, and the pressure of her slim finger still pushed against Lux’s lips.
Gunfire sounded again, but distantly.
They heard heavier, human footsteps, a door clicking open, muffled voices growling nearby.
“Twitch and Fortune must be in cahoots, they both sent chopper squads to our damn heist!”
“Where’d that fancy Demacian bint scurry to? Boss Graves’ll have our heads if we don’t come back with the ice.”
Shouts and gunshots rang out at a different spot.
“It’s the fuzz!” someone growled, “We been ratted out boys. Worry about your own hineys first!”
The voices and heavy footsteps faded.
The ginger grinned ear to ear.
“Gosh golly dearie me, it’s a double triple quadruple cross,” she whispered, “Time for us bearcats to beat it like it was a bum’s rush at a Blind Pig.”
“What in heaven’s damned name,” Lux managed to breathe, “Is going on? Who are these mooks?”
“The usual brunos and button men,” the ginger shook her head in a swish of the big white feather on her headband and her choppy orange bob, “It’s how things be in this ol’ town. Don’t sweat your sweet noodle, bunny…”
She drew her hushing fingertip along Lux’s jaw, and with it, a shiver.
“…ain’t no big sleep for you tonight. Us girls stick together, that’s the deal, capisce?”
“They’re after me,” Lux swallowed.
“Of course they are, you’re the shiniest Sheba in this dive.”
Lux flushed, knowing at least what that meant, and rather sure they were more interested in the Dawnheart Diamond than her…
…but she was a daughter of the Crownguard family. She would be kidding herself if she thought the gangs of Crime City wouldn’t realize that the difference in asking price between the diamond and her ransom would be simply philosophical.
“Miss, I need to find Jarvan, I need to find my fiancé…”
“Aw, your big-ol’ Joe Brooks he-man, he’ll be just dandy, doll,” the girl pinched Lux’s cheeks. The heat from her thin body burning against Lux’s skin was the only thing keeping Lux from shivering in her scant gown, “Everything’ll be Jake, you’ll see. But much as I’d love to stay and spoon, we gotta get you and your ice out of this wingding. I need those pretty gams of yours firin’ on all cylinders as soon as we open that door, you follow?”
“I…” Lux licked her dry lips, “I don’t think you follow…those goons are after me, as long as you are with me, you won’t be safe.”
The flapper girl’s grin became even wilder. She held in a spluttering snort of laughter that would’ve given them away.
“Honeycakes,” she husked, “What’s that word you just said? ‘Safe’? Sorry, it ain’t in my vocabulary.”
Lux stared at her. The girl cocked her head like a raven. The nasally voices of the rats chimed again, muffled, distant.
“Time to blouse,” she said, and pushed open the door.
“W-where are we going?”
The redhead thrust her head through the door in a feathery swish and then tugged Lux after her.
“To get my stuff!” she announced, stalking with leggy grace through the emptied hallways, past a few partygoers cowering in bathrooms or hunkered down under the smoking room tables, “Still time for a little whoopee before we see a man about a dog.”
Lux’s companion paid them no more attention than she would the wallpaper.
“I’m hoping that means you have a way out and we’re going to escape,” Lux muttered, still coming down from the thunder of gunfire echoing in her ears and the fact she’d watched a man get knifed in the throat.
She didn’t want to look to see if there was any blood on her dress. None of it felt real yet, but it might, if she was…if it was on her.
“Got my lil ol’ breezer parked on side, struggle buggy’s got your name on it,” the girl said, peeking around a corner, “Up yon stairs and away!”
“Shouldn’t we be going down?”
“Naw, they’d expect that.”
“If you expect me to climb down a hotel storm drain in this dress, you are utterly out of your mind, madam.”
The look she received at that moment might have cracked the strongest of men, and was accompanied by the very most amused of eyebrows.
Lux rolled her eyes.
“Fine, you’re a crazy broad, I get it!” she threw up her hands, “Sorry, but I’m in a life-threatening situation, I can’t trust anyone, and I don’t even know your name!”
“Jinx.”
“…well, if you’re going to be a child about it-” Lux huffed, “-I’ll go find my way to the police, by myself-”
Luxanna turned to stalk away but found her arm tugging against the grip of that little hand, again, strong as a statue.
The girl’s eyes were dangerous, cherry-red.
“That’s me, doll. I’m Jinx.”
Lux found herself again at a loss for words.
“Wh…” She fumbled for her smile like a girl pawing for her lipstick in the back of a darkened cab, “What were your parents thinking?”
“Dunno, didn’t ask,” the girl, ‘Jinx’, shrugged, “They’re dead now.”
Lux swallowed.
“I’m – Luxanna Crownguard of-” Lux’s lips faltered on her own name. “Lux. I’m Lux.”
The girl’s smoldering stare softened away, and a smile bloomed on her lips, as pretty as the Dawnheart diamond, and a hundred times as bloodstained.
“Well, there…you…are…Lux.”
She brushed past Lux, shoulder to shoulder, and Lux felt the tickle of ginger hair at her cheek.
“Comin’?” Jinx whispered there.
Lux gave her eyes harder than the diamond at her neck as she followed.
Higher, higher, up the stairs, away from the noise, the gunsmoke, the sounds and smells of fear. Lux’s bare, abused feet and the flapper girl’s pointed heels on carpeted hallway and cold stairwell after carpeted hallway and cold stairwell were their only company, until…
The terminus of their flight came, on a high rooftop balcony overlooking the busy street, far, far below.
Lux’s panting breaths slowed.
“Why in heaven’s name,” she huffed, “Would you take us here?”
Jinx said nothing, only craned her swan neck for a moment to check the roof quickly for skulking interlopers, before she gave a giggling cry of ‘aha!’ and sprang behind a decorative gargoyle.
While Lux stared in astonishment, the cold night breeze prickling goosepimples on her bare arms and legs, Jinx slipped on a garter belt with some kind of holster in it for – a champagne bottle? – slid in against her thigh.
Then she hoisted that enormous cello case over one shoulder, evidently having stashed it on the roof in the interim. Finally, she returned to the dark and grunted softly as she dragged out something even bigger, a clunky, ugly iron tube with a pair of sawtooth jaws at one end, like an oversized beartrap stuck to an industrial chimney pipe.
Lux was beginning to think she wasn’t just some flapper girl here for the free hooch.
“Here,” Jinx said, pushing the tube at Lux, “Hold Fishbones a sec, I got my garter twisted.”
After nearly tottering over with a gasp from the cold weight of the thing tipping into her slight grip, Lux shot Jinx a dubious glare.
“This was never the way to your jalopy, was it?”
“Sure it is, toots!” said Jinx, “Just wait and see – argh, hold your sweet bubs a minute here-”
The rooftop door kicked open.
It was the bellboy, covered in blood, being pushed ahead on the tip of the lead rat’s machinegun; one of the rat’s gleaming eyes was wrapped up behind a bloody rag.
Swarms more rats followed, and two more muscular goons in tweed caps and rolled-up sleeves, one bald and one bearded.
“Toldya, Fortune has the best sniffers,” said the lead rat, “There’s our little ice fairy!”
“And there’s the ice,” muttered one of the Tweed hats, Graves’ men.
They shoved the bleeding bellboy to his knees. The hindmost rats kept their guns trained on him. Others pushed a crowbar through the handles of the rooftop door, blocking anyone from following them as the leader and the two Graves goons pushed past and closed in on Lux and Jinx.
“Hand it over, sweetheart,” growled the one with the beard, “And we’ll treat ya real nice.”
“New deal,” snarled the rat, “We can smooth over this little disagreement easy; our boss gets the diamond, yours gets the dame.”
“Fifty-fifty split?” the Graves men considered, “Tell ya what, rat, let’s get ‘em both out of this madhouse and the bosses can decide who gets which.”
Both turned to Lux.
She’d frozen up, a delicate figure silhouetted against the edge of the building, the long white searchlights of the police gathered outside, answering the siege of the building with one of their own, catching in the warm hues of the Dawnheart Diamond.
Nowhere left for Lux to run.
“H-hey boys,” she found her tongue, despite the fear in her chest, despite everything, “Why, silly me, I really should’ve stuffed this little rock in a pot plant, shouldn’t I?”
“Naw,” growled the rat, with a wicked, hissing snicker, “Then we’d have had to twist it outta ya, see?”
“Now, Mister,” Lux held her hands up, backing toward the edge as the trio approached, “You w-wouldn’t hurt a couple of defenseless damsels like us, would you?”
The one-eyed rat and the tweed men stopped, at least, for a moment, to share a glance before they burst into simultaneous howls of laughter.
“Yah, sure, angel,” said the bald man, “You and your lil’ flapper friend? Us fellas wouldn’t hurt a hair on your lil’ heads…”
The rat narrowed his remaining eye, and suddenly pointed his gun at Jinx.
“…speak for yourselves,” he growled, “Mitts up, ginger! Where I can see ‘em!”
She’d been bent over just to Lux’s left, the whole time, half in shadow and rummaging half-hidden behind the open lid of her cello case, only the bobbing feather of her headdress visible over the rim.
At the click of the Tommy gun, Jinx perked and peeked up over the edge.
“Hm? Lil’ ol me?”
She rose to her full, unimpressive height.
“But I’m just a poor girl, from a poor family!” she pouted in a reedy, childish voice, her eyes huge and luminous, spitting image of a waif palm-out on a street corner if it weren’t for her glitzy flapper rags.
To Lux’s surprise, the rat sucked in a guttural, choking growl and both of the Tweed-caps took a step back.
“You!” one of them snarled, voice thick with a tangle of shock, outrage –
And fear.
Click.
Lux shivered with a gasp. She felt them all at once; the heat of Jinx’s body, the grip of her little hand on her arm and the cold of the barrel at the small of her back.
“That’s me!” shrilled her voice past Lux’s ear, breath tousling her golden bob, and then they were facing a wall of guns, blades, and clubs.
“Drop her or we’ll fill ya both with lead, ya damn turncoat!” growled a rat.
Jinx giggled.
“What, and lose a ransom worth as much as the diamond? Hah ha ha, nah, you won’t.”
“Principessa-” one of the Graves men hissed, “What the hell are you doin’?!”
“She’s bilkin’ us all, you woolhead,” growled the one-eyed rat, “You ain’t seein’ it, are ya? Who ya think made the calls?”
Jinx’s grin slid up her cheeks in Lux’s periphery, and the whole confusing mess suddenly clicked in Lux’s head.
“And they said Twitch’s flunkies were just dumb muscle,” she clicked her tongue, “Here’s the deal, fellas-”
She stepped back, pulling Lux with her, until they both tottered on the edge of the rooftop. Lux felt the sudden rush of vertigo, even without turning to look.
“I know my fellow lowlifes love a turn at the gambling table, so let’s try Freljord Roulette,” Jinx purred, her breath tickling across Lux’s neck and jaw.
Despite it, despite everything, all Lux could think of was the lean, wiry muscle of Jinx’s body at her back. How incongruously solid she felt through the softness of her dress. How some part of Lux’s brain told her, against all logic and sense, that Jinx would never let me fall.
“How lucky are ya all feelin’?”
Her wicked gaze flicked between the rats, the tweed men, and the bellboy.
“Cuz I’m gonna walk outta here with the dame…so how about… the last one of you alive gets the diamond!”
Lux’s heart jumped into her chest at that.
They all stared at Jinx, then at each other, in a silence cut only by the wail of police sirens.
“…orrr…” Jinx cocked her head, eyes wide and wild, as if she’d suddenly had the best idea, “I jump, and take ‘em both with me, and the coppers pop the lot of you while they’re scrapin’ our cutie-patooties off the pavement!”
She let one of her feet dangle off the edge of the roof, all of the goons giving a low, shuddering groan at once.
“Hold on – hold on, you crazy skirt! You’re nuts!”
“And howl!” Jinx grinned, “But see, I know my onions, Mac. There’s three whole gangs here and only one diamond. You’re already on the wheel, so you might as well cut the chewing gum! So? What’s it gonna be?”
She darted her eyes over them all, as if hazarding a sly guess.
“Hmmm…wonder which of you wiseguys is quickest on the trigger?”
A wild, insane thought overtook Lux.
While all eyes were on Jinx over her shoulder, she reached up with her free hand, snapped the chain at her neck, and held the diamond in one shaking hand out over the yawning drop.
“No,” Lux growled at them all, “Here’s my deal, you scum buckets. You put your toys away and walk out of here to fight another day – or I drop it, fifty storeys down into a plaza full of cops.”
The whole standoff froze up with indecision and confusion at the sudden change to the game – but now there was a held breath, a horrible sinking sensation in Lux’s gut that she’d made a terrible mistake, that something had tipped.
Jinx’s eyes glittered brighter than the diamond.
“Ooh, Luxie,” she murmured, “Appreciate yer moxie, kid, but-”
“Screw this!” snarled the rat. He swung his tommygun to fire at the Tweed cap duo.
The bald guy went down with a grunt and splash of blood, his mate pulling a big revolver and blasting two of the rats through the skulls, swearing about a doublecross all the way.
“Duck, ducky!” Jinx yanked Lux back from the brink and shoved her down with a yelp to the cold concrete.
The whole world exploded into gunfire, and it was all Lux could do to plant her belly to the ground, hands over her ears, and with terrified eyes watch as the pretty flapper girl at her back transformed.
They’d taken their eyes off her for just a moment, but it was all the time she needed. Her grin, if anything, got bigger, but now there was something stuck in it.
The triangular pin of a grenade.
Lux heard the chattering of beartrap teeth before Jinx lobbed the clunky, ugly little device she’d pulled from somewhere into the face of the one-eyed rat.
Chomping jaws bit the brim of his fedora and his fellows scattered.
All pretense of human behavior dropped from the lead rat; he pawed in animal panic to try to knock the hat free, but he’d barely twisted away when it blew in a plume of smoke, force and fire, with a deafening crump that blasted him to smoldering chunks and knocked every other gangster in his radius, human or rodent, flat on their rumps.
In the chaos, Jinx darted behind her cello case and yanked it up into her grip.
“Hey, rats with gats!” she wolf-whistled, amid a chorus of mechanical clicks, “Mine’s bigger!”
The case fell open, and what burst out of it was a mechanical fever dream of six rotating gatling barrels, seeming bigger than Jinx’s whole body, fed into by a bullet chain running into a chunky box.
The rats squealed and twisted as Jinx’s monster roared and spat hot lead in a wheel of churning fire. The rooftop erupted in chunks of debris torn up by the heavy ordinance – two – four – seven rats burst like bags of blood and tumbled lifeless to the concrete.
The bellboy, suddenly free, sprinted for his life with shattered roof pavers jumping and hopping like swing dancers at his heels.
The bearded Tweed-cap leapt behind a heavy smokestack and ducked out to shoot at Jinx – his bullet whistled past her ginger bob, she twitched into his direction in a blink, and the gun sparked from his bleeding hand.
He yelped, dove in low and made a wrestler’s grab for Jinx’s waist, but he was far too big and clumsy for all the explosive power of his leap.
Jinx smacked him in the jaw with the smoking barrels of her weapon, spun past him in a dancer’s swish of her legs and caught him in the back of his head with a snap of her heel.
His arms spun on the edge of the rooftop for a split second before his gulping shriek of terror faded, rapidly, in his fifty-floor descent to the pavement below.
Jinx howled with laughter as she swung her giant gun back into her grip and peppered the few remaining rats, desperately trying to return wild, erratic licks of Tommy gun fire whilst diving for cover.
They weren’t quick enough. The muzzle-flames of the gatling gun lit her mad grin and wild red eyes in flashes of hellfire as she chewed them to rodent mincemeat, laughing all the while.
Lux stared into the eyes of the Devil.
Smoke rose from the whining barrels as they ran dry, their juddering laughter chiming out; Jinx’s kept going, breathless wheezing, her thin chest jumping with utterly indecent gasps of bliss.
The moment her gun was dry, Lux looked up to see the glint of steel in the shadows to her left.
“Jinx!” she screamed, as the bellboy, eyes wild with desperation, leapt out of the dark and swung his arm, a throwing knife spinning for Jinx’s throat.
Her head jerked back, and Lux’s heart leapt into her throat.
Jinx turned her head, eyes blazing. Caught between her grinning teeth was the blade of the knife.
She flicked her hand up from her thigh, the hooch-bottle she’d had strapped there in its holster flicked up in her hand. Lux finally saw that it was hooked into some kind of improvised pistol grip.
Pop!
Pressurized moonshine sprayed and the ‘cork’ pinged from its moorings.
A blood-red flower blossomed in the bellboy’s forehead. His eyes rolled back in his head and he flopped like a puppet with the strings cut.
Jinx spat the knife from her teeth with a clang and flicked the splashing contraption in her grip up to her squinting eye.
“Aw, applesauce, I spilled my coffin varnish!”
She sucked greedily from the gushing mouth of the bottle before she licked her lips with a serpent-pink tongue and ejected the empty bottle with a click from its pistol housing. It clattered and smashed to glittering pebbles on the roof.
“Whew! What a bunch of flat tires those goofs turned out to be! Well, just you and me now, thrill! Our night’s sure comin’ up aces, ha ha…”
Lux wobbled to her feet, nostrils full of the reek of carnage and gunsmoke, keeping her eyes on the devil girl.
Because if she looked at the bodies, she wasn’t sure she’d not go to pieces.
The only thing that felt real was the hard facets of the Dawnheart diamond, crushed into her palm so hard she could feel it cutting her.
Jinx danced between the dead, humming something jazzy to herself, until, with a swish of ginger tresses, she was right up in Lux’s face.
“Relax, ducky. Everything’s jazz. Co-pa-cet-ic-”
She clicked her tongue at the last syllable, let one devil’s eye vanish in a wink and licked her lips, so close Lux could smell her heady perfume mingling with the strong spirits on her breath, and feel it tickle her mouth and chin.
“So…cash…or check?”
Lux’s lips parted, panting breaths between them, her stomach twisting, her skull ringing with the echoes of the gunfire.
“…what?” she whispered, “Wh-what are you?”
Jinx’s smile returned, a wicked little twitch of cherry lips.
“Toldya, bunny. I’m Jinx!”
She bumped their foreheads together, then slid away with a little swish of her dress. Lux swayed on her feet as the girl withdrew, like a puppet wobbling on her strings.
Jinx hummed. She clipped her cello case closed and slung it over her back, picked up the trap-jawed metal tube, and pulled some kind of whining metal wire out of one end of it, looping it around the smokestack and locking it off.
She flashed that apple-cheeked grin over her shoulder at Lux, wiggled her brows.
“You’ve been a real Lalapazazer, doll, but it’s time to mooch. Fair warnin’, here comes the tuba solo - block yer ears!”
Lux dully lifted her hands to her ears, wondering what fresh hell Jinx was about to unleash; she wasn’t disappointed.
The girl swung the tube and stock onto her shoulder and pulled a trigger; the sawtoothed jaws sprung open, and the far end belched a cloud of smoke and fire as it shot a fast-moving projectile away into the dark, trailing a hissing coil of thick wire.
It punched onto the roof of a neighboring building, half-visible in the glare of the police lights. Jinx twisted the contraption on her shoulder, the wire twanging with release, drawn taut.
She plucked it like a guitar string with one narrow fingertip, grinned in satisfaction. She turned the tube until it was vertical in her arms and hooked the sawtoothed jaws over the wire, locking them with a clunk.
Then she stepped daintily onto the stock like a girl hopping into a cab home after a night on the town, turned, and thrust her arm out expectantly.
“Coming?”
Lux stared blankly at her, feeling as though her heart and breath had stopped entirely.
“I…”
She tottered on her bare feet, suddenly aware of her cold toes on the concrete, the wind around her bare legs, the sting of all the tiny scrapes and scratches this nightmare night of misadventures had left on her skin.
“You’re asking me to come…with you?” Lux sputtered her astonishment, “Where?”
Jinx shrugged.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. Who even cares?”
Lux froze. She stared so hard at her hand that her eyes stung with it.
Insane. She was an heiress, worth millions, she had everything, the world at her feet. She was about to be married. Her future was laid for her, a golden stairwell ending at the Demacian throne. The fate of her family, her whole nation, hinging on Jarvan's ring on her finger and his diamond around her neck. She would have it all, it was all decided already.
And then there was Jinx, her devil grin, offering her no promises, no assurances, sure as hell no safety net. Offering her nothing at all, except the one thing she’d never had.
A choice.
Against all odds, against everything, Lux found herself tipping forward, gaze locked on the redhead’s fingers.
Their fingertips brushed.
Dimly, Lux became aware of thundering footsteps on the stairs up to the roof; a banging on the rooftop door, barred by the now-dead goons, and the shouting of angry voices.
Policemen, more gangsters; she even thought one of them might have sounded familiar.
Jinx flicked her gaze to the door, smirking.
“Going once, doll.”
Lux fiercely shook her head.
“I…I can’t. Y-you don’t – I’m an heiress – I’m to be married – my family, you don’t understand –”
“Blah, blah, all I hear is hooey and bushwa. You really gonna tell me you care about all that?”
Lux’s eyebrows drew in a sharp line and her blue eyes flashed.
“You’re gonna tell me I shouldn’t?”
Jinx grinned that devil’s grin.
“All that’s just strings you’re dancing on. String, though? Easy to cut. Easier than you think. Whole world’s out there, ducky. Just waitin’ for you.”
Her eyes flicked back to the door as it shuddered and jumped under the application of a great deal of force.
“Last chance.”
A breath caught in Lux’s throat. She hesitated.
The door blew, bent off its hinges, and a wedge of velvet purple shoulders on immaculate white burst through, barely covering the hulking dark-metal form of Galio, a dozen policemen and a flustered, gun-toting Caitlyn at his back.
“Miss Crownguard!” Galio hollered in his booming voice, a thundercrack. Their pale peering faces searched the carnage, recoiling with oaths of shock.
They hadn’t seen Lux. Her eyes caught Jinx’s one last time, and then fell, against all her will, to stare at Jinx’s lips.
“New offer.”
Jinx’s arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her in close, chest to chest, and Lux’s world was suddenly full of those eyes, and the husk of Jinx’s breath against her lips.
“Cash,” whispered Jinx.
Lux’s face tipped up, gulping air, and she snatched Jinx’s shoulders for grip as their mouths met.
Her kiss was a stinging rush of gunsmoke and moonshine and the eager tangling slither of her tongue, above the sweet, sultry cherry of her lipstick.
Lux’s world dissolved away into a blink, caught in the heartbeat of smell and texture and taste rolling and crashing like waves into her unready mouth and the little kitten’s moan she caught herself making into Jinx in return.
The shouts of her rescuers barely registered.
Jinx parted with a wet pop and gush of warm breath.
Lux’s own breath spilled in a ragged groan that couldn’t, wouldn’t, become words.
She had only an instant to see that cruel flicker in Jinx’s eyes, and the pinch of her sharp white teeth to her devil’s lips, before she felt the slide of Jinx’s fingers, combing through her own…
…and the weight of the Dawnheart Diamond leaving her palm.
“…and check,” Jinx whispered, and pushed away from Lux.
The last Lux saw of her was that grin of hers growing ever wilder as she swung away onto her wire, cackling like a witch as she slid into the dark. Her luminous shape receded into the distance.
“Stop her!” someone shouted, and there were rushing boots, and the sounds of cocking guns and then their now-familiar boom and crack and echo.
But it was too late. By the time they’d reached to cut the wire, it was already slackened – from the other end.
Jinx was gone into the night, the Dawnheart Diamond in her grip, death and chaos spreading like ripples in a pond in her wake.
Lux wobbled, her legs suddenly liquid, and sank to her knees, Galio’s protective steel wings sheltering her, Jarvan’s worried face a blur in the corner of her eye.
All the world receding into the head of a pin, the stench of blood and gunsmoke in her nostrils, and the taste of moonshine and cherry lipstick on her tongue.
Rain kissed the dirty windows of her office like an overeager streetwalker, but even that couldn’t drown out the shrieking sirens. Five thirty in the morning and they were still going steady since before she’d gone to Lee Sin’s.
She rolled over in her dirty bunk, amid the clinking of dead soldiers. One arm flopped to the floor to drop the last of them. Slack fingers wrapped in old bandages from elbow to busted knuckles, stained with sweat and pain and other people’s blood.
“The difference between you and me, kid,” Lee Sin had muttered, binding her latest wounds, his fingers in her mouth, checking for loose teeth, “We both fight blind, but I don’t have a choice.”
She hadn’t wanted to hear it, full of spite and bluster about the much bigger opponent she’d left sprawled like a tossed rag doll on the muddy floor of Knockout’s infamous ring. But he’d felt it in her tensing shoulders, heard bitterness in the dismissive snort of her breath.
“Go home, Vi. And wake up sober.”
Lee had shoved the grubby wads of her night’s earnings into her mitts and pointed her at the door he couldn’t see with an arch of a brow behind his blindfold.
He was a hard man to say no to. But the whisky sister shilling moonshine on the third corner between her night job and home was harder.
The blinds weren’t keeping out the occasional pulses and flashes of lights passing. Crime City must have bitten someone who mattered last night, for the law to care that loudly. The sounds, the colors, picked at old wounds, old memories, in her muddled half-conscious nightmares.
Across from the bunk, away from the shredded old punching bag, on the wall above a battered desk, all those wounds painted her on the moldy stucco, an open history book. Spelled out her scars in photos, sketches, scrawled notes and newspaper clippings, slowly crumpling and fading between futile spiderwebs of string and pins as the trail of years drew colder.
A little girl’s face, cherubic in spite of hollow-eyed malnourishment, a tousled mop of hair. Hand in hand with a taller girl, scarred lip, scarred brow, scarred to her heart and soul before she was the age other girls got to be called ‘innocent’.
A scarred brow twitched in her sleep, then knotted in annoyance at the best and worst sound she could possibly have imagined at this hour.
The chime of the doorbell, a hell-siren sitting just below the dusty glass window of her office door, whose peeling letters spelled VIOLET LANE: PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
Vi hauled herself up in a chalk sketch of disheveled pink mane, sweat-sheened muscle and fresh bruises, some of them still bleeding through the bandages.
There was a time she’d cut a debonair sight in a grey-and-white dinner suit, red rose at her lapel. A time she’d woken up next to a pool of fragrant hair on her pillow and soft lips brushing the tattoo on her cheek instead of her cold, stale mattress and the smell of her own whisky sweat on the sheets.
Now all she had was one more photo; face down under the empty pillow next to hers, a smile she wouldn’t look at, even if she always knew it was there.
The doorbell shrilled again.
A groan brought her to her off-white shirt; a tie slung on, her trousers and belt. If they didn’t keep jamming the damn doorbell, she might even make it to her shoes.
She wasn’t open. Five thirty in the morning, receptionist wasn’t even in.
But then neither was the rent.
Kicking some more empty bottles under her bed to hide the mess from the prospective client, Vi made it to the door and forced some vague mask of respectability to a face still youthful despite a short lifetime of abuse.
She pushed it open to a vision stepped out of Heaven above.
The girl looked at her with a flaring of pretty blue eyes and moue of even prettier pink lips, then, without a word, her brows met in a little stormcloud and she pushed past Vi in a zephyr of bright perfume and into the office.
It figured. Five thirty in the morning, and in walks the first sunshine she’d had in that office in years.
“Can I help you, miss?”
The dame was facing away from her now, scanning the interior of her office with bright, shrewd eyes. At Vi’s words, her shoulders stiffened, then slackened, as if it were somehow the last question she’d expected, when it really should’ve been the first.
“I don’t know, Detective,” she shot back, “Can you?”
“You might have to start with a different question, sweetheart,” said Vi, clicking the door shut and surveying the pretty interloper, “It doesn’t say ‘psychic’ on the door, that’s Madam Oubliette, two doors down.”
The more unpleasantly sober she got, the more Vi noticed the little details. Her perfume, her makeup, her clothes, from the veiled hat to the body-hugging white dress to the fancy shoes, probably more expensive than the building they were standing in added up. She reeked more of money, class money, than Vi did of bad moonshine right now, but that wasn’t the only scent tickling Vi’s nostrils as she’d pressed past.
No, there was a sweat of fear and adrenaline under the girl’s bright perfume. Her little blonde bob wasn’t perfectly coiffed. Her expensive makeup was hastily applied. And there were bruises, scratches, on her long fine legs. More were visible on her shoulders and arms as she doffed her coat and slung it over her arm.
She kept fidgeting with it.
Whoever she was, Vi measured she’d just had quite the night.
“If I’d left it till morning,” the girl said bitterly, “You’d have already read all about it in all the papers.”
Vi’s brow twitched. She glanced at the window the girl was staring out of, the blinds drawing angular shadows on her face.
More passing sirens.
Vi, wordlessly, poured her a drink and gestured with the bottle to the seat opposite her desk. “Take a seat, lap some courage, and tell me what’s got a girl too fancy to set foot in this neighborhood knocking down my office door at five thirty-two in the morning instead of sitting in a police station…”
The girl’s shoulders settled, and she looked up through the shadows of the veil, and that was when Vi recognized her.
“…Miss Luxanna Crownguard.”
Even a hangover like a knife in her temples wasn’t an excuse to forget a face that had been plastered all over the papers for the past week.
“I’ll hazard a guess. A royal engagement party in Crime City went a little less storybook and a little more dime novel?”
The angel-faced girl, maybe future Queen of Demacia, sitting in Private Eye Violet Lane’s office gave a rueful smile.
“Oh, you could say that, Detective.”
Luxanna took a deep breath, and her eyes glazed as if in dread of the incredulity of what she was about to tell.
Vi’s eyebrows started in a dead-eyed furrow and then slowly rose, inch by inch, like caterpillars crawling up a tree trunk, as each word of the tale unraveled, as one drop of insanity after another spilled from the lips of the royal heiress.
She only moved her lips to her whisky at the mention of Police Commissioner Kiramman. She’d have to beat the hell out of herself later for the slip. Or maybe she could permit herself the one.
“….and now,” Luxanna was pacing, by this point, swishing in her little dress and squeezing the white foxtail shawl in the grip of both her hands, “…now Jarvan’s fighting mad. That diamond’s his family heirloom, passed down through generations, locked in a vault for more than a century. You have to understand, he’s not going to stop until the Dawnheart’s back in Demacian hands. He’s throwing his weight around with the police and he won’t listen to me. He’s determined to avenge this dishonor personally.”
Vi’s eyes stayed lidded with weariness, but her brows had nearly met her hairline by this point.
“And you’re sure he won’t calm down by this evening?”
Luxanna didn’t hesitate. She shook her head.
“I know him. He’s a reckless man, and accustomed to a whole country bending over backwards to give him what he wants. He’ll pressure Caitlyn’s department, push all their buttons, and if they can’t, he’ll march off to the front line to do it himself.”
Vi swigged her whisky, felt the burn on her tongue.
“That’s not how this town works,” she said, “If what you’ve said happened tonight, we’ll be six inches from a three-way gang war by tomorrow evening. Fuzz struggle with the Families at the best of times; and if you don’t mind me casting aspersions on my former comrades…”
Luxanna hadn’t missed the signs; the old certificate on her desk, the battered uniform coat she’d hung hers up beside on the hooks, so Vi wasn’t about to pretend she had.
“…but half of them are bent, being generous,” she put the whisky down, “And the other half just haven’t found their own hinges yet.”
Flashing blue eyes pinned to hers.
“Why do you think I’m here, Miss Lane?” the little ingenue said, “Find that diamond. And…the girl, too, if you can. Discreetly. Before my fiancé gets himself killed trying.”
Vi gave her a shrewd squint of an eye.
“Knew a girl like you once. Too smart to be as pretty and rich as she was. One of those things will always end up killing the other two, you know.”
“Oh, I’d like to think I can keep two out of three,” said Luxanna, with a dazzling smile, “She’s the one who sent me to you, by the way. Said you’re the only one who knows this town and all its shadows well enough to go where she can’t, and pull this off.”
Vi’s face fell into shadow.
“Cait…” she muttered, “…the hell are you thinking.”
She stood, turned away from Lux, and stared at her case wall, rubbing her hands over her scarred lips.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” she shook her head, “I’m gonna have to show you the door. I’m just a gumshoe, ain’t no paycheck worth putting my head into crossfire between the Three Families. No rock, and no dame either.”
Lux rose in her periphery, heart in her throat and eyes blue and desperate.
“No thanks,” Vi continued, “And if you have half the brains I think you do, you'll get on the first boat back to Demacia, Prince or no Prince, and forget about the diamond and whoever that crazy bint was.”
“Jinx.”
Vi’s words, heart, and stormy smirk all died in the same breath.
“She said her name was Jinx.”
Grey eyes slid up the wall, across the pins and the stringlines and the faded photos of a haunted little girl, headlines of explosion at factory connected to organized crime, and head of Silco crime family believed dead, and missing girl sighted?
The last of those was pasted over a word scratched into the wall by a carving knife, in drunken grief, in Vi’s own hand, ten long years ago…only the corners of a J and an X visible poking out their shame beneath the clipping.
She turned to the blue-eyed heiress, a lifetime aching behind her eyes.
Vi slipped her coat from the back of her chair. She slung it about her brawny shoulders. She slipped the fedora over her pink fringe.
“I’ll take the case,” she said.